So apparently mid-census re-districting is OK (if there’s a court case challenging this I’m unaware of it). And racial gerrymandering is now OK, according to the late ruling of the SCOTUS.
So how does this end?
Do we have every state redistricting every year, depending on which party controls the legislature?
Or does Congress say “Stop the insanity!”, and we have a constitutional amendment mandating that all states turn over the redistricting process to non-partisan commissions (such as the case in California until this year)?
Hopefully it ends with an overwhelming blue wave which takes both houses of congress, ends the 60 vote threshold in the senate, and then reforms the Supreme Court and passes an anti-gerrymandering law (among many other necessary things).
The real answer is it ends when it consistently benefits the democrats more than the republicans. Once that happens, then republicans in congress and the republican supreme court will rule gerrymandering unconstitutional and pass laws against it.
I believe Wesley’s assessment is correct. But can we be confident that, if they achieve gerrymandering superiority, Democrats will do the right thing and kill it at the national level?
This is one of those issues that the average uninformed voter simply isn’t interested in, even though election reform is widely accepted as necessary.
Just an anecdote, but a few years ago, NJ Dems had an overwhelming majority and some idiot attempted to redistrict the state to benefit the Dems, but it went nowhere, so I hope that will be the case everywhere.
I think it only ends with a constitutional amendment that requires non-partisan committees to set up the districts, once it becomes clear that gerrymandering is tearing the country apart (or, that Dems can use it to their own advantage).
The direction we’re heading is the Republicans will eventually control election results to the point where they no longer need to worry about how people are actually voting.
As a practical matter, how do you achieve that? It’s easy to say a committee should be non-partisan but the committee will be made up of people. How do you prevent the appointment of people who will follow party orders?
To give an example, the court system is supposed to be non-partisan. But we’ve seen that become a tool of one party.
I don’t know how this ends, but I feel the answer is “not well.” The congressional representation from the southern states is going to be white, whiter and whitest. The way that Senate representation benefits homogenous farm country, and with the disproportionate power that the Senate has, “not well” may be an understatement.
The end of our democracy has been foretold before, but this sure seems like a ball at the top of a hill starting to roll.
States have been successful in implementing non-partisan districts in the past by using non-partisan committees. There are no guarantees in life, but it’s sure going to be more fair than a map created by the party in charge.
It is a regular and ongoing cause of befuddlement for the furriner contingent that USAian dopers genuinely cannot fathom how you can get a non-partisan government body.
Much of that bemusement comes from the fact you have a living, breathing examples of functioning non-partisan bodies operating just over the 49th parallel. Ditch the schemes to annexe them, steal their best ideas. I’d also contend there were any number of world class non-partisan bodies within the US although 45/47 has corroded too many of them.
You possibly don’t even need a constitutional amendment to break the gerrymander jam. Simply each state elects their EC defined number of districts proportionally using a jungle primary or mixed-member proportional representation. Something akin to the way Maine & Nebraska do it.
It’s really not that difficult.
For Federal/state positions, appoint the best people for the job, rather than electing the best funded candidate.
Yes, that’s why it’s a race to the bottom. If red states do all the gerrymandering, blue states have to do it, too. Once it’s obviously tearing the country apart, or the blue states have it as a winning strategy, then either something has to give or we split up in a few different countries.
I’m hoping what happens is a constitutional amendment that bans the practice (and bans corporate money in politics, while we’re at it). Basically, a voting reform amendment that resets us to pre-Citizens United and includes non-partisan districts. Otherwise, I don’t see how we escape the continued corruption of our political system.
Who’s appointing the best people? The President? Congress? Do you think this would produce good results if we put this system in place today?
If the people are electing the best funded candidates instead of the best candidates, how do you stop them? Do you put in a system which regulates who people can vote for? I see massive potential for abuse in that.
It’s easy to create a system that works when everybody agrees to use it fairly. It’s a lot more difficult to create a system that will keep working even when some people are trying to manipulate it to their own benefit.
And that’s the real answer. It will end when enough real voters, on both sides, finally get pissed off enough to hold the parties accountable, and demand they fix it. A groundswell of bipartisan support for an unambiguous constitutional amendment that bans such actions, and establishes an objective-as-possible process for establishing voting districts.
Just so I’m not being all negative, here’s one idea I’ve proposed before. We establish a system of self-selecting districts. Districts would no longer be based on geography.
Take New York as an example. It has a population of around twenty million people. Let’s assume around fifteen million of them are eligible to vote. The state had twenty-six congressional districts.
So we let all fifteen million voters decide which congressional district they want to join. It doesn’t matter where you live in the state; you can belong to the district of your choice.
It would be impossible to gerrymander these districts because any individual who feels they are being represented properly would just “move” to another district.
Smaller groups would also gain an advantage because they could band together throughout the state and get their own representative elected, rather than being diluted and having to settle for a major party candidate. If there are six hundred thousand libertarians, for example, scattered physically throughout the state, they could still band together into a single district and vote their representative into Congress.
America has existing institutions that are intended to be nonpartisan that in practice are extremely partisan -much more partisan than than their equivalents in Canada.
There’s no technical fix to hyperpartisanship - in the US its a prisoner’s dilemma where defection is already expected.
It’s fundamentally a culture problem. You need to establish a culture in the public service which fosters the idea that public servants work for the public as a whole, regardless of who is in power at any given moment, and have a duty to protect the institutions against current whims. Canada still has this, the US used to have it, but it’s being attacked on all levels now. Trump et al. are deliberately trying to make the US civil service as partisan as possible.
Fixing a culture problem is not the work of a few days, or even a few years. Eventually Trump’s house of cards will collapse, and a new generation of public servants will be left picking up the pieces, and they will be the ones who have to rebuild the culture of non-partisanship. Hopefully memories of Trump’s bullshit will remain for a couple of generations, as a remind of what happens when you don’t hold the line against people who want to destroy a functional civil service.
Civil servants at local, state and federal levels do have a culture of non-partisanship. These are not professional politicians or elected officials but regular folks who do the job of keeping government operations running for the general public. They are frequently unappreciated for their efforts but that doesn’t mean they are all bad at what they do.
Anyway, nonpartisanism is a feature of the civil service. Trump is taking a wrecking ball to that. He wants to implement loyalty tests and fire those who don’t sufficiently grovel. The problem we have is a Congress that is refusing to do its job and rein him in. They could..but they won’t. The blame lies squarely on the Republicans for that and history will condemn them.
This is my fantasy. All voting districts should be drawn up by strictly non-partisan groups, with the sole criteria being the number of eligible voters living in the district. No consideration is made of the ethnicity, political alliance or anything else that would effect who the residents of any district would vote for. If, for example, a state is entitled to five Congressional representatives, then the total number of voters in the state is divided by five and five districts are set up with that number of voters in them. Straight line boundaries, with no weirdly-shaped areas to ensure that any group has a majority of voters in any district. Candidates must, of course, live in the district for which they are running and are required to regularly report to their constituents on what they are doing to serve them.
This will happen right after I gain the ability to flap my arms and fly to Mars to establish a self-sustaining colony there.
This is pretty much what it was like in California until Trump upset the apple cart and started the race to the bottom. So the only fantastical part of your dream is: how do we make this happen everywhere all the time.